The Ultimate ‘Concept Creep’: How a Canadian Inquiry Strips the Word ‘Genocide’ of Meaning

In 208 AD, the Roman warrior emperor Septimus Severus arrived in Britain with 40,000 soldiers, intent on subduing the tribes inhabiting the northern part of the island. These tribes were part of the Caledonian confederacy, which occupied modern Scotland. But to the Romans, most everyone who lived outside the empire was a barbarian, full stop. So when Severus became frustrated by the Caledonians’ (sensible) refusal to submit to pitched battle, the emperor settled on another strategy, which we would now call genocide. In 210, he assigned the job of extermination to his son Caracalla, a mass-murdering lunatic who would later assassinate his own brother Geta in front of their mother. It likely was only Severus’ death in 211 that cut the operation short and saved Scotland from a complete holocaust.

Caracalla always is listed by historians among the worst emperors of Roman history. But tellingly, his attempted annihilation of the Caledonians isn’t typically cited in the historical bill of particulars. In ancient Rome, genocide was seen as an acceptable military tactic if it was directed at indigenous peoples. In a speech reportedly delivered to his troops before the Battle of Mons Graupius, the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus denounced the Romans thusly: “Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.” It is quite likely that the whole oration was invented by Tacitus. But invented or not, Calgacus’ words—especially the widely quoted ending—perfectly captured the mindset of genocidaires the world over, then and now, who always imagine themselves to be improving a society by annihilating it.

Today, we regard this mindset as sociopathic. But even into modern times, genocide often was justified as the cost of “progress.” In the 16th century, Spanish colonists reduced the indigenous population of their Hispaniola colony from 400,000 to 200 within the space of a generation. The Belgian rape of Congo reduced a population of 20 million to about half that number. Stalin’s forced starvation of Ukraine killed about five million. In all cases, the killers believed that these genocides presented a net benefit to the civilized world. Hitler, who slaughtered six million Jews, thought that the entire planet one day would lionize him for ridding the world of what his diseased and evil mind conceived as a uniquely destructive pestilence upon humanity.

One of the painful coming-of-age processes for all of these societies has been to recognize the horror of their ancestors’ crimes. This has produced mixed results. Germany has set the gold standard with its unqualified rejection of Nazi ideology, while other countries remain mired in a spirit of self-delusion—such as Turkey, whose official policies still serve to deny the reality of the Armenian Genocide.

My own country, Canada, now tends very much toward the German model, with politicians and educators frequently stressing the horrors inflicted on indigenous peoples. The idea of “genocide” even has been stretched to include the idea of “cultural genocide,” a vague but emotionally resonant term that is now widely used, despite having only a tenuous connection with the (admittedly murky) legal concept of genocide. (“Despite recent developments, customary international law limits the definition of genocide to those acts seeking the physical or biological destruction of all or part of the group,” declared the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in a 2001 judgment against Radislav Krstic. “An enterprise attacking only the cultural or sociological characteristics of a human group in order to annihilate these elements which give to that group its own identity distinct from the rest of the community would not fall under the definition of genocide.”)

This Canadian desire to confront our past is laudable and well-intentioned. Unfortunately, as I wrote in Quillette, the resultant tendency to apocalypticize every policy discussion surrounding indigeneity now has created a sort of social panic that afflicts much of the intellectual class. In the midst of a 2017 controversy surrounding a white Canadian painter who works in a Woodlands style popularized by acclaimed Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, an Indigenous artist declared that “what she’s doing is essentially cultural genocide, because she’s taking [Morrisseau’s] stories and retelling them.” For those of us who prefer to reserve the word “genocide” for such acts as throwing human beings into ovens and mass graves, as opposed to the borrowing of artistic styles among painters, this cheapening of language feels very wrong.

In April, Quillette authors Vincent Harinman and Rob Henderson wrote about “concept creep,” a term coined by University of Melbourne professor Nick Haslam to describe how ideas such as abuse, bullying, trauma and prejudice all have been expanded to encompass unrelated forms of human behaviour. Even words such as “violence” and “safety,” which once referred quite specifically to physical forms of injury, now are used to impugn controversial words or even abstract ideas. The cheapening of the term “genocide” presents an extreme example of this trend. A word once generally reserved for the greatest crimes known to humankind now has been reduced to a facile moral hashtag.

This has been done with the full participation of many journalists, who always are happy to draw readers in with dark click-bait headlines that channel the idea of holocaust. On Saturday, for instance, Canada’s most widely read daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, splashed the blood-red word “GENOCIDE” across its front page, along with a sub-headline indicating that “the final report from a tumultuous three-year inquiry concludes that thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls” were this genocide’s victims. By way of comparison, another article that appeared on the same front page informed readers that “A few weeks at summer camp leave lessons to last a lifetime.” Between the two, which do you think will sell more newspapers?

The Star article is, in fact, nominally accurate: A national Canadian inquiry truly has used the term “genocide” to describe the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in my country. But while this term would be accurate in regard to the murderous policies inflicted on Indigenous peoples during much of North American history, it is completely inapt in regard to the modern tragedy of MMIWG—even if it’s considered impolite to point that out.

A 2015 Statistics Canada report indicated that “almost a quarter (23 percent) of [the] 516 homicide victims [in 2014] were reported by police as Aboriginal, a group that accounted for just five percent of the Canadian population.” The overall Canadian homicide rate in 2014 was 1.45 per 100,000 population—which breaks down to 1.13 victims per 100,000 for non-Indigenous Canadians and 7.20 for Indigenous. This large difference in homicide rates—which has been well-known and widely studied since at least the 1990s—is indeed a national scandal. And it is undoubtedly true that this scandal is deeply rooted in the legacy of anti-Indigenous racism that has permeated Canada since its founding, including historical actions that arguably fall into the category of genocide. But one should be able to take stock of these historical facts while also rejecting the perfectly ludicrous claim that today’s elevated rates of indigenous homicide deaths constitute an ongoing genocide—a claim made repeatedly throughout the inquiry’s report.

Discussing the number of people killed in a genocide has an inherently dehumanizing effect on individual victims. But numbers matter, since the term “genocide” becomes completely meaningless if is used as a catch-all to describe all forms of homicide that afflict disadvantaged groups. The government of Canada recognizes five genocides—corresponding to Armenia, Rwanda, Ukraine, Bosnia and the Nazi Holocaust. The average fatality count for these genocides was about three million. The total number of Canadian MMIWG killed over the last half century is about one thousandth that number.

A finding of genocide does not require the discovery of concentration camps and gas chambers: As with the Armenian and Ukrainian genocides, one may infer genocidal intent based on policies that inflicted deadly conditions on men, women and children by intentionally destroying their property and livelihoods, or casting them out into the wilderness to die by exposure, starvation or pogroms. This is in fact how many real historical genocides against Indigenous peoples were perpetrated. But that has no relevance to the manner by which MMIWG are dying in 2019—which is not by pogrom or rampaging militia, but by the same ordinarily horrible way that most homicide victims meet their end: domestic violence and street crime. Nor is there statistical evidence to suggest that Canadian constabularies as a whole don’t take these crimes seriously—though there are individual cases in which police have acted disgracefully. “In 2014, a higher proportion of homicides of Aboriginal victims were solved by police compared with non-Aboriginal victims (85 percent versus 71 percent),” the government reported in 2015.

The homicide rate for Aboriginal females in Canada, measured in 2014, was 4.82 per 100,000 population. This is about 30 percent less than the homicide rate for the entire U.S. population (6.2). So the statistical implication of this week’s report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (to cite the body’s full name) is that the entire United States exists in a daily state of permanent genocide.

Of course, one could attempt to prove the existence of such an ongoing U.S. genocide by claiming—truthfully—that the higher rates of black homicide are connected to the American legacy of slavery and other genocidal practices. But if this sort of historical analysis is invoked as a means to justify the use of the term genocide, then literally every killing known to humankind can be swallowed up by the word, since no human being exists in isolation from the past. And that is just one of the many bizarre corollaries that emerge from this inaccurate use of language: Since about 70 percent of MMIWG are killed by Indigenous men, the effect of this week’s declaration is to present Canada’s Indigenous peoples as genocidaires of themselves.

Despite this, many Canadians seem anxious to embrace the report, as it affirms the simple narrative that the challenges faced by Canada’s Indigenous peoples are largely the result of white racism, and so can be solved if Canadians simply awaken to their own collective bigotry. Indeed, the problem of MMIWG has been studied comprehensively on previous occasions, and so it was never completely clear what this new inquiry would supply Canada, except a sort of quasi-evangelical call to arms against the forces of racism. Given this, the inquiry commissioners no doubt felt enormous pressure to deliver a dramatic new re-formulation of the moral stakes at play in the MMIWG crisis, which perhaps explains their decision to supply a grandiose new label to stick on front pages.

In the long run, the effect of this will be not only to erode the moral force of the term genocide, but also to hurt indigenous people by encouraging the terrifying and condescending conceit that their status in Canada is akin to that of Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda or Jews in 1939 Germany. The MMIWG inquiry set out 231 recommendations, which deserve to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the whole $92-million exercise now is coloured by the rhetorical overreach surrounding the final report.

All societies lie to themselves about genocide. But the nature of the lies change over time. In Tacitus’ channeling of Calgacus, the Romans would “make a solitude and call it peace.” In Canada, we now do something closer to the opposite—summoning into being a spirit of genocide that hasn’t existed since those shameful days of universal plunder.

Jonathan Kay is Canadian Editor of Quillette. Follow him online at @jonkay.

Featured image: Steel engraving of a sketch depicting the speech of Calgacus before the Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Graupius, from the 1859 book, The Pictorial History of Scotland: from the Roman Invasion to the close of the Jacobite Rebellion. A.D. 79-1646.

How about “equality” and “justice”, which used to mean the achievement (or goal) of eradicating discrimination, but now creepily means legally sanctioned wholesale discrimination against males, whites, heterosexuals, and Christians.

@W2: It’s not about grievance, it’s about using words carefully before they lose their meaning (as you note)– and its implications. The obvious exaggeration employed by the report breeds cynicism and distrust. It is a fundamentally dishonest conversation about race. As such, it is divisive. If you don’t think that merits at least some discussion, feel free to walk your asshole on by.

That comment is dumb as F@#$% – Go back and proselytise at your ‘Grievance’ studies classes. You said nothing in that comment. Take your head out of your own black hole. How about attempting to articulate a coherent argument that tackles a point in the initial argument?

So the homicide rate for Indigenous women is 4.82, and the overall rate was 7.20 for Indigenous. This would suggest that the homicide rate for Indigenous men is 9.6 (assuming 50/50 gender ratio), but is there any comparable concern for all these dead males? And what proportion of these Indigenous homicides also have an Indigenous killers, because I believe genocide also typically requires the killers to be of a different race, religion, or tribe/nationality?

Are the government commissions also considering the possibility that the higher Indigenous homicide rate is not primarily due to a legacy of discrimination, racism, or genocidal policy, but is instead part of a violence prone native culture? From what we know how many N. American native tribal histories, they were often in brutal combat with each other, and to the extent that such combat was not genocidal was likely due to the low level of technology and resources available for them to utilize, at least until white settlers arrived with more deadly and efficient ways of killing.

It went into the black hole that is government appointed consultants and underworked, overpaid political appointees. Meanwhile, elderly people have no means to feed / care for themselves as senior care homes are full and in disgusting condition … and there are not enough personal care workers to look after them. I begrudge this money given where it Could have been deployed to the benefit of canadian society as a whole.

I don’t think so. Once whitey imposed law, the tribes in Canada almost entirely stopped fighting each other. For a few generations at least the Indians have been quite peaceful in an inter-tribal sense. It’s just the kind of violence endemic in all poverty stricken and entirely dysfunctional societies. A sober Indian is no more violent than anyone else, but a drunken Indian is, and Indians are vastly more likely to be substance abusers than average. As with Negroes down in the States, those Indians who choose to take advantage of the perks that only they are entitled to, and who choose to make decent lives for themselves do so and become entirely accepted members of society. I have several Indians in my family.

And yes, this is all whitey’s fault. We’ve been pandering to the Indians for long enough to make them now almost entirely helpless. It’s the classic example of ruining people with Victimhood and specialness.

71% of missing and murdered natives were men, between 1982 and 2011. We’ll not be able to help this problem as Canadians of whatever stripe, unless we’re willing to look at the complete picture.
Enshrining victimhood to all native women makes it more difficult to see our common humanity, makes it harder I think for natives of any sex to feel empathy for the other.
And the term linguistically trashes the millions of acts of love, respect and kindness that indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians continue to show each other. We don’t have to bow to it and take it in.

Yes, the commission’s report is yet another case of “world ends tomorrow, women and girls impacted most.” Somehow Kay managed to miss the obvious fact that the expansion of the term genocide in this case came about because the report was about women and girls. It’s not like there aren’t a thousand similar examples. Rape, domestic violence, etc.

lol you people are insane and have no clue about Indigenous culture or history prior to contact. go learn to read a book you inbred pigskins now get your own labels and are melting the fuck down— its hilarious seeing the fragility!! ??? you people are a joke! keep copying and pasting the same age old stereotypes to desperately deflect from the inconvenient truth. white people are nutty!

So what arguments do you have besides ad hominem? What is the inconvenient truth you mention, and what specific points of the article do you find evidence to rebut? Speaking of fragility, ironically, your response indicates that. Calling people “inbred pigskins” must be fun, hope you feel better now.

Ada- Give your head a shake.The only indigenous culture that I have seen after a lifetime living near a reservation is one that is essentially work shy, hand out hungry, fouls their own community with garbage and pollutants …An inconvenient contrast to the myth that they are custodians of the natural world. Sometimes making bad decisions results in bad outcomes … Unless you’re in Canada in which case you get a lifelong hand out and tax payers get a $94 million commission.

@E. Olson, reading your comment makes me suspect that the white culture is one prone to stupidity and historical revisionism. Did you even read the article? If any group is inherently violent (which is just a patently ridiculous claim), it would be the Europeans. The very first example Jonathan writes about is the massacre of the Caladonians by the Romans… Get your head on straight, you racist neanderthal.

Precisely. Darwin would have something to say about a society that is given money, education and benefits that are not available to the greater society and yet still manage to Produce these results. Sad.

“Seriously – what is the word for genocide by your own people?” – Suicide

but seriously a death rate this low is lower than the woldwide average for deaths by violence and falls very low on the list of causes of deaths. It will have no significant effect on a population. To put it in perpsective if everyone uniformly lived to 100 which would be a fantastically healthy long lived population the death rate per hundred thousand would in the steady state be 1000 per 100,000 . A detah rate of 7.2 per hundred thousand is 0.7% of this unbelievably low level. That is not to say that we should not seek to reduce all unnecessary deaths but a genocide this is not.

And one fact unmentioned is that this indigenous society is incredibly successful as defined by being the group with the highest birth rate Of all other groups / cultures in Canada. Literally the fastest growing population in Canada. Unfortunately Canada’s taxes cannot keep up with the demands coming from this group … if they’re not careful they will kill their golden goose .

“Despite recent developments, customary international law limits the definition of genocide to those acts seeking the physical or biological destruction of all or part of the group,”

Would not this definition include those governments in the Middle East and Africa that punish homosexuality with the death sentence? Is that not the systematic “destruction of all or part of the group?” Why is it that genocide against homosexuals is never addressed as what it is?

Ah, how could I forget. “Intersectionality,” simply means that the rights and lives of gay people are negotiable when faced with another oppressed group. Our lives and rights aren’t worthy based on principle, but merely on their utility at hurting the correct (privileged) groups and those groups only. Our equality is worthwhile on a case by case basis apparently.

He made no error. He made a generalization which is quite true. That there are exceptions is no news. It is interesting tho that there is a strong correlation between having been a British colony and having anti-gay laws.

“Since about 70 percent of MMIWG are killed by Indigenous men, the effect of this week’s declaration is to present Canada’s Indigenous peoples as genocidaires of themselves.”

Since the author has submitted – truthfully! – that homicide among black people in the US is linked to historical slavery by white Americans, it is perhaps not so much of a stretch for one to argue that it is the fault of white Canadian men that indigenous Canadian men kill indigenous Canadian women.

Therefore, not only is it not genocide, but even if it was, they are not genocidaires of themselves.

Additionally, although slavery can be genocidal, not all slavery is genocidal. Certainly, the US practice of slavery was not genocidal, slave owners wanted to increase their numbers by mating slaves as they were expensive. From the 400k original black slaves, the US now has 40 million black citizens. Some genocide.

Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell, both black men, each give very clear and revealing answers to this. A short clip of Elder and Dave Rubin (on Rubin’s show) via youtube says a huge amount about race relations in the USA.

Actually it’s NOT truthful that “homicide among black people in the US is linked to historical slavery.” Like the Indigenous people of Canada, the large percentage of black homicides are perpetrated by other blacks, not whites. According to FBI statistics, “Homicide is largely intra-racial. Of crimes involving a single offender and victim: 81% of white victims were killed by a white perpetrator; 89% of all black victims were killed by a black perpetrator.” Similarly statistics exist for US Hispanic victims.

As for the point of the main article, so many words like genocide are losing all meaning as they are bandied about by more and more people poorly educated in the art of language and the importance of concepts.

“by claiming—truthfully—that the higher rates of black homicide are connected to the American legacy of slavery”

[citation needed]

He goes on about blaming white people for the problems of minorities is wrong, and then throws in this howler. Slavery was 160 years ago, folks. Black people didn’t have these problems in the 1950s and 60s. It wasn’t until the 70s, welfare, and the absence of black fathers that the big problems started. I mean, if the government is providing for your family, what do you need a father for? The cultural zeitgeist was, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

I just saw a great discussion b/w Benjamin Boyce and Jonathan Church where Church made the distinction between ‘racism’ and ‘the legacy of racism’ – which have been conflated under the term ‘racism’ in newspeak. I think this is an important distinction to be pointing out. Not only because they are different in nature; but if anyone hopes to combat these there are necessarily different responses to be made. the re-defining of words to suit the progressive narrative is not to anyone’s benefit; least of all their own supposed intentions.

I think a pathological fear of death is closer to the mark. The zeitgeist seem to be that death is unnatural and no one should ever die for any reason and if someone should die then someone or something is to blame; but that is a childish fantasy.

In the past we used religion to manage the universal fear of death and were told stories about a good life followed by salvation and paradise.

Now fear of death is managed through science and the law. But, to date, science has been unable cure death and the law has been unable to outlaw death. All we have been able to do is save some very premature babies, at great expense, and extend the lives of some of the ailing elderly by six months or so, again at great expense, but still life expectancy has begun to fall, not increase.

Accordingly, there is panic and the fearful look for people and things to blame and bring to justice.

It is sad that Mr. Kay seems willing and happy to blame history and his culture and race.

“Indeed, the problem of MMIWG has been studied comprehensively on previous occasions, and so it was never completely clear what this new inquiry would supply Canada, except a sort of quasi-evangelical call to arms against the forces of racism.”

Do we need another one of those? The TRC did a good enough job, and they’re still working through the recommendations – woe betide anyone who says or acts contrary to the TRC 94 Calls to Action Bible.

I hope FNMI activist leadership take a good long look at where they are going. Hard to see there not being a push-back from regular Canadians who, while sympathetic to Indigenous issues, aren’t ready to make deep systemic changes due to perceived rascism.

I think of the Gerald Stanley trial. Difficult case, deemed a rascist outcome by the FNMI activist community, condemed by certain politicians. The subsequent documentary nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up makes matters worse. How do any of these reactions help advance reconcilliation, when everything and everyone is deemed racist?

Hopefully we can apologize our way out. Trudeau is doing his best.

(Almost comical if we follow recommendations of MMIWG. Example: If an Indigenous man kills an Indigenous woman, he should get a stiffer sentence, per report. But wait! We have to create a Gladue report to see if some of the Indigenous man’s experiences warrant a lesser sentence. It’s a sad satire.)

$92M is a tidy sum, even if it’s only Canadian money. For that kind of grift, you need to show results. Emotional results are just fine. Facts not important unless they support the emotional narrative.

See, e.g., Mueller report. $30M seems like a bargain, although is US dollars.

I agree totally Jonathan with your conclusion regarding this completely inappropriate use of the word “genocide” and the term “cultural genocide”. As to the inquiry itself, if it illustrated consistent examples of police authorities not providing proper investigations or taking disappearances seriously enough….then it served a useful purpose. Watching several of the testimonials to the missing on the TV, it struck me as more of a therapy session for family members, than an inquiry into a serious Canadian social problem.

There have been a few situations where the police have not taken reports seriously and someone was able to continue their serial murder sprees. Partly resources, but in some cases simply incompetence.

What i dislike about this report and the whole tenor is the desire to take a series of crimes, mostly unrelated that vary from domestic violence, sex worker murders, some serial killers and yes some racially motivated. Many are in places with few people spread over vast distances with few officers. So let’s call it genocide. It isn’t genocide. It is a series of crimes, many unsolved and probably unsolvable. Populations where there is social breakdown, for whatever reason are characterized by higher levels of crime.

What this report will do is justify more intrusion of the Canadian federal government in the lives of these people.

“The insidious and gradual nature of the obliteration of Indigenous peoples, and the lack
of a uniform national policy spearheaded by a totalitarian mastermind, differentiate colonial
genocide from our traditional understanding of what constitutes a genocide. These distinguishing factors have, unfortunately, allowed the Canadian consciousness to dismiss Canada’s colonial policies as racist and misconceived, rather than acknowledge them as explicitly genocidal and, even, ongoing.”

What they should have said is that the intrusive and almost totalitarian power of the federal government in the lives of these people are harming them. Bureaucrats have too much say in their lives, the structures of governance are guaranteed to produce unaccountable local administration. By any measure it is a catastrophic failure, and the only rational response is to scrap the Indian act, fire the bureaucrats and leave the people be. If they need assistance the resources can better be used through the existing social safety net that exists in Canada.

But no. It is my fault. In a way yes. My taxes have paid the wages of the bureaucrats who have run the programs.

“The insidious and gradual nature of The obliteration of indigenous people “ … HMMM.
That does not accord at all with the most recent report from statistics Canada which said that indigenous people are in fact the fastest growing demographic of all cultures and societies in Canada.

How — in the name of logic — can these two concepts co-exist on the lips of one government?

If I do it, it’s justified. If you do it, it’s genocide, and you need to . . . PAY.

There seem to be no adults in charge in the government, media, or the NGO’s, only screaming spoiled children demanding their share of what they want, ’cause of (fill in the blank). And then they act surprised when regular voters lie to the pollsters and tell them to go stuff it via the ballot box?

Before the white man had power in Canada the Ojibwe destroyed an enemy tribe. Thousands of people were slaughtered, including child soldiers, women, babies. It had been capturing and burning Ojibwe alive for years with impunity.

Some believe this tribe were the Eries. It’s chief lived in the centre of their city and sent his child soldiers out first as he believed his people were superior and would easily defeat the Ojibwe. He was not aware of their true scale and ability to amass forces.

A few women and children were spared and integrated into the Ojibway people. To this day it is recognized that those erie descendants are not part of higher status clans. This was genocide and tribalism. Something we must apparently decolonize to.

Jimmy:
I had thought that it was the Iroquois who destroyed the Eries who had made the mistake of siding with the Hurons in their war with the Five Nations (the Tuscarora had not yet arrived/returned). Doesn’t change the point of your story though.

Not one human has ever lived longer than their one life.
Every human has ancestors who arrived anywhere at some point in time, but was not there before.
A person born in an area is just as “native” as anybody whose parents were born there…you can’t claim credit or credential because of what others did. You can be descended from kings or famous scientists or philosophers or warriors, but none of that is you and you contributed exactly zero to those lives.

I find it strange that the author calls out the absurdity of blaming whitey/racism for the death of the native women when most are killed by native men, yet is fine with slavery being blamed for high black murder rates in the states.

Blaming slavery is just as ridiculous as blaming racism for the murder of native women killed primarily by aboriginal men.

In both situations, the plight of the majority of both populations is bleak and despite throwing enormous financial resources at both populations, their plight doesn’t seem to be improving a whole lot. But rather than face root causes and doing the hard work necessary, it is easier to blame the boogeyman called whitey and demand yet more money.

If they ever fixed the problem, they’d be out of a job. Thus the shrill, unhinged calls of genocide when it’s not a genocide. It will mean more funds for them and more jobs for unemployable grievance studies majors.

As the great man Mel Brooks said in his documentary Blazing Saddles, “Gentlemen, we must protect our phoney baloney jobs! Harrumph! Harrumph!”

No one knows whether present indigenous peoples exterminated the previous inhabitants, (and so on, ad infinitum). Reparations/punishment for sins committed by past generation (regardless of individual guilt) will only continue the cycle. In any case guilt cannot be attached to an existing generation unless they were in a position to prevent the earlier atrocity and choose not to do so.

Given indigenous women are largely being killed by indigenous men I find it dubious to call this genocide. This is also an issue given that some of the stuff they mention was more of a problem in the past. They also use examples that are disconnected, such as racist police officers. By this approach any time a white Canadian murders an indigenous person for any reason it’s “genocide”.

As the author observes, if you try to claim Indigenous men are affected by their circumstances, then every killing can be blamed on something else. I hate this school of thought – it robs people of their agency and says “no, the system is to blame”. To me, the logical end point of this thought is that said people are little more than animals as they lack any moral responsibility for their actions, so it unintentionally ends up being racist.

And as Kay observes, if this is genocide, what do you call the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, Holodomor and Cambodian genocide? This is where concept creep leads us. People told me I was making a fuss over nothing. Guess I have this to show them now.

I get that the First Nations have suffered badly and agree things should be done to resolve their circumstances but I’m gonna straight up call bullshit on the idea that this is genocide.

The Canadian news, particularly the CBC have been pushing the ‘VICTIM’ status of the indigenous very hard for years. The indigenous now have the problem that their public image is one of hopelessly beaten down peoples. The current report is just one more example of the ‘suffering’ they experience.

It is bad for any minority to be publicly perceived hopeless moaning damaged individuals.

Great straw man you’ve got there, victor.
For a start conservatives don’t care about race, only the fascist left do. Secondly, wanting to conserve ones own culture is a commendable thing. Even lefties admit this, when the culture in question is any but our own. Oikophobia is a left wing condition we are only just beginning to understand. It is the fake idea that supporting one’s own culture is somehow evidence of “hating” people of other races. This fake idea stems from a real hatred, a hatred by the left of their own culture.

@Peter from Oz: It’s because they don’t function very well in this culture, but chances are they would do badly in any culture they were put in. As you say, they are steeped in hatred, but the only thing you are permitted to hate these days is themselves and what they think their culture represents.

The Spanish and my people ( the Portuguese) weren’t angels by any standard. But the tragedy that befell the indigenous populations of the Americans was largely due to germs the navigators brought with them. If genocide was on their mind, how would you explain the large indigenous populations of much of Latin America? Poor aim?

This is indeed concept creep of amazing dimension. Please correct my math if I’m wrong but it seems that from 1980 – 2010 about 40 indigenous women were killed or went missing per year (not at all the same thing but never mind). Even using current popation numbers, of the current 700, 000 indigenous females this represents 0.006% of the population.

So genocide now means the murder or running away of 0.006% of a demographic.(or for engineering/statistical safety let’s multiply by 10 giving 0.06%) This goes beyond concept creep and into concept hyper-inflation.

Great article, I beat this drum often to the shock and outrage of my peers. Mr. Kay should take the next step, and point out forcing kids to go to religious boarding schools was a misguided mistake, not genocide. I’ve yet to be convinced that anything which happened post-Confederation deserves that term.

Pre-Confederation, Canadian history was just a lot of canoeing, mutually beneficial commerce, and drinking whiskey together. Even florid instances pointed to by the outraged like Cornwallis’s scalp bounty in Father Le Loutre’s War and Amherst’s letter wishing smallpox on the warriors besieging Fort PItt were in the context of scalping and massacres by Mi’kmaq and Pontiac’s Confederacy.

The 1755 deportation of the Acadians was the closest event to a genocide. But while it was callous and brutal there was no desire to kill us; just to get a population that had been engaged in twenty years of endemic guerilla war out of peninsular Nova Scotia.

“forcing kids to go to religious boarding schools was a misguided mistake, not genocide” @Kd’E

Residential schools for Canadian native children were inspired by the theories of post-Civil War ‘progressive’ Americans who sought an alternative to the murderous/genocidal ambitions (and policies) of their fellow countrymen who proclaimed (and believed) that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.

to be clear, though, the forcing of indiginous people’s into ‘boarding schools’ in both the US and Canada was intended to completely destroy their connection to their culture. To say it’s a ‘misguided mistake’ is just a right-wing version of misinformation and misusing words, etc. if you aren’t willing to call a spade a spade you are just as bad as the progressives in trying to create a malicious narrative.

removing people from their culture and destroying the family and community is about as destructive as you can be toward a people. it creates generational trauma – which is a real thing. this is the ‘legacy of racism’ (which I mentioned in a comment above as needing to be differentiated from the word ‘racism’ itself) both are bad. but they are different and require different responses.

I think the idea of Quillette is NOT to engage in this kind of conflation of concepts and to get honest about what we really need to address without resorting to name-calling, etc.

Okay xyz, let’s be honest. The American indigenous people lived in illiterate tribal societies before colonization. When Western society was erected all around them, and their old primitive way of life became impossible, many understandably lost the will to live. You can’t expect these people to become (or even want to become) literate, civilized people overnight, and certainly not without a potentially long, painful transition during which their entire mentality is fundamentally transformed, for better or for worse. That said, I think the West’s mistake was to be so vacillating in their treatment of these people; if you are going to be a conqueror, then conquer, and assimilate the survivors forcefully, or massacre them, or enslave them. Instead, the West started to feel guilty after the initial conquests and put the survivors on protected reservations, only half-heartedly attempting to assimilate them. Since then, the survivors and their children have been subjected to generation after generation of identity crises as they are pulled in opposite directions between these two worlds — the ruins of their old tribal existence, and the Western civilized world with which they cannot yet fully identify. And now the modern generations of whites are so alienated from their own civilization they have made common cause with the indigenous survivors and African Americans, etc. Hence the current chaos.

@ breath:
you make some interesting points. however, what was done to these populations with regard to the boarding schools was a particular kind of harm that involves destroying the culture and family/community cohesion itself; which severely impacted their ability to navigate the changes in the culture around them.

“to be clear… a right-wing version of misinformation and misusing words… conflation of concepts and to get honest” @xyz

How very precious!

I’m not honest because I point out that the historical record doesn’t support the fiction that the motivation of those who established Canada’s residential schools was to exterminate physically the native population of Canada and don’t agree that “cultural genocide” is the same thing as actual genocide?

But, to be entirely fair, it might be true that I’m so far gone that I’m not even sure that “generational trauma” is a real thing that trumps “agency,” “self-reliance,” and “self determination.” And, I freely confess to even suspecting that powerful self-interested elites in Canada feast ($$$) on narratives of native victimhood, “generational trauma,” and “cultural genocide.”

first of all, don’t quote ” ” someone and input words that weren’t said. that’s another way of generating a false narrative – something I don’t appreciate in the progressive narrative or yours. Please respond to what I actually said, not what you decided I said.

Second, I absolutely DID NOT equate generational trauma (which is what I actually referred to, but you’ve decided to call it – not me – ‘cultural genocide’) with genocide; and in previous comment I made that clear. I agreed with this article, and made the point that it is a problem to confuse racism with the legacy of racism in a previous comment. To reiterate what I ACTUALLY said to you – the fact that it isn’t genocide also doesn’t necessarily equate to boarding schools being a mere ‘misguided mistake’ – there was clear malicious intentional destruction involved, it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. Your comment went beyond the discussion to start to conflate actual historic racist actions as a ‘misguided mistake’ – sorry, that’s a problem too.

I also did not call you a ‘monster’ – this, again, is your resorting to hijacking what I actually said into your own narrative. And again, you utilized quotes in a comment directed at me, that were not my words.

You are doing the EXACT SAME THING as SJW’s. Taken a page out of their book. Please learn to argue in integrity, otherwise you are only adding fuel to the fire.

Also, my original comment was directed @ Kory only. I agree wholeheartedly with the article. I took exception to the description of boarding schools as a ‘misguided mistake’; and all of my comment was a response to that.

I was sent to boarding school in Darjeeling when I was 6. It was terribly traumatic: I started wetting my bed and did so until I was 13. The threat of boarding school again kept me petrified for many years, and moving around, I never made friends. Then when I was 17, I asked to go to boarding school again: I did well academically and ended up in a high end research university.

As I said above, the image of the Canadian indigenous peoples is of moaning no-hopers, purpeptrated by CBC. I would not hire one without proof of previous performance – too much of a risk when grant money is hard to come by. The only declared indigenous I had in a hard science class quit after 6 lectures, saving me from probably having to fail her – that did worry me because the appeals process would have been a time-consuming nightmare.

Its is really good to see some of the bands trying to get a slice of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, even though they will probably buy in with my tax money.

Very happy for you, seriously. also, the Heard Museum has a whole exhibit on the US Indian boarding school experience. there are some displays that include video/audio of those who went through the experience. some reported positive experiences in the schools. And, over time the Indian School became more of a positive since it became a way to preserve Indian culture rather than an attempt to destroy it. To have had a positive experience doesn’t negate the net affect on the overall culture and what was originally intended: the destruction of the family unit, the community and the culture. THIS is what has caused epic levels of generational trauma. This does not necessarily mean that it was impossible for some to have had a positive experience, or to have made the most of it and become successful. lots of people from all backgrounds and experiences have found a way through – that doesn’t negate that impacts that it has had on many and on the culture itself. The ‘moaning no-hopers’ – that would be the ‘legacy of racism’, wouldn’t it?

It’s hard to say because we have the benefit of hindsight, but at the time residential schools were being introduced, it’s hard to imagine the motivations weren’t good, if not up to the PC standards of today. Attempting to educate children who otherwise would find themselves useless in the new world, rather than, say, dumping them in mass graves, doesn’t sound horrible. It was probably the equivalent of today’s progressives who thought this would be a good idea, whereas the conservative impulse would be to do nothing and let them sort themselves out.

As to the supposed motivation to destroy the family unit, community, and culture, I think there’s some truth to wanting to “get the Indian out of the child,” but given what Indigenous life was like, that seems justified to some extent. Their culture was adapted for a life that didn’t exist anymore. However, I don’t see how the family unit is supposed to be destroyed by boarding school. Are we to believe having your kids gone for a few years means a mother not only stops loving them, but starts treating them in a way that introduces trauma? This is a horrible vision of motherhood, only realistic for the kind of brutal killers that kill their toddlers. And we are to believe that when these kids had kids of their own, their biological impulse to parenthood was so warped they perpetuated the abuse?

If this is the “legacy of racism” that’s done so much damage, colour me unimpressed. If you have a hard childhood because your mom stopped loving you when you went to boarding school, you own that trauma and do better for your kids. Absence of community is no excuse, these days few of us are born into a community: we have to find it through religious organisations and the like.

We all have our cross to bear, it is our responsibility to make our own life better and pass on a better life for our kids. If there is a legacy of racism, it is the racism of lower expectations, where old stock Canadians think Indigenous people cannot be expected to solve their own problems. If we’d stop brainwashing them with fantasies of their own genocide, they could look for solutions where they actually lie: in their own hands.

But if they did that, how will we justify the next $100 million report?

“at the time residential schools were being introduced, it’s hard to imagine the motivations weren’t good, if not up to the PC standards of today.” @Stephanie

Oh my goodness, it’s right back to school for you for a lengthy struggle session and public self-criticism.

Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, a leading Father of Confederation, and the promoter of Canada’s first residential schools for natives, was also “the father of biologically defined white supremacy as an organizing principle of the state” according to a recently published scholarly(-style) article by the Interim Director of Canadian and Aboriginal Studies and “Full Professor” of History at the University of Ottawa,

I had one indigenous student who did very well in a second year hard science class. (He may only have been half indigenous). But most don’t do very well academically. This could be the result of the tragically high rates of alcoholism, and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Likely indigenous Canadians are genetically more prone to addiction because they have only been exposed to alcohol for a few hundred years. In Eurasia there has been 10,000 years of farming and alcohol production. This has perhaps resulted in a lot of alcoholic related genes being eliminated from the population, or an increase in genes that protect from alcoholism. On the northern fringes of Europe (Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia) there seems to be more alcoholism than further south, where farming has been practiced for longer.

A tendency towards alcoholism has been shown to be largely genetic. It is not caused by your grandfather being in a residential school. The residential schools were a terrible idea but they were set up by the progressives of the time. The schools didn’t create alcoholism–they were a misguided response to existing alcoholism and child neglect in the Indigenous communities.

The most harmful things Europeans did to Indigenous people were to introduce Old World diseases and to introduce alcohol. And these weren’t really anything to do with racism. The Indigenous people have a right to be angry about the white people bringing diseases and addiction. But we can’t undo the past. If all the non-Indigenous people left Canada tomorrow it would not change the rate of addiction among the Indigenous.

However, it might be helpful if Canada stopped allowing other troubled cultures to continue to immigrate to Canada in large numbers (for example Somalians) so more resources could put towards helping the Indigenous people. (The Scots have already been here for several generations and Scotland isn’t going to take them back no matter how many buzz words such as “decolonize” and “indigenize” get thrown around). Research about finding ways to cure addiction would be the most helpful. (and this of course would help all the non-Indigenous addicts too). Certainly wasting huge sums on ridiculous government inquiries is no help.

Spouting platitudes about being on “unceded Indigenous territory” before every public gathering is just window dressing designed to make people feel virtuous. If Canadian land is unceded Indigenous land, why are we rapidly selling it all off to the Chinese?

“removing people from their culture and destroying the family and community is about as destructive as you can be toward a people. it creates generational trauma – which is a real thing. this is the ‘legacy of racism’”

Well, that is exactly what the Left is doing to Americans. Glad to see you’re calling it racism and that it is very wrong.

@xyz it’s amazing how thoroughly these indigenous people have embraced critical theory word salad fuckery. One wonders how much better they would do if those efforts were directed more productively. Have you read the actual report?

“….was intended to completely destroy their connection to their culture.”

You forgot the fact that this “culture” was really pretty backward and inferior, and it was with the best of intentions that we tried to “assimilate” these poor benighted people into what was, quite objectively, a vastly superior “culture”.

We were trying to help them better themselves.

Assimilation is something the US is regretting it gave the old “heave-ho” to back in the day.

The alternative has been horrendous. How many immigrants (legal or illegal) will learn English these days? Or think of themselves as “American” first and foremost? Or even at all?

I wasn’t disagreeing with you on that or the notion that it is ‘problematic’ concept creep to equate everything that is damaging as ‘genocide’. However, I think it’s a different thing altogether to make the claim that it was merely a ‘misguided mistake’ – saying something isn’t genocide doesn’t excuse it from meaningful criticism. This is conflating criticizing a policy with labeling it as genocide. Taking a page from the SJW’s by throwing anything that is related under the most extreme label/definition makes it impossible to have reasonable debate.

@rnt (and @ gda.. and, well, everyone here:)
I agree with you: the Left is employing these same tactics because they think their beliefs are superior to yours, and as such they believe they are righteous in forcing their beliefs on you in whatever way they can. That’s a problem. But since everyone here seems to think that’s acceptable in other situations, it’s hard to argue that this is unfair, isn’t it?

@ stephanie:

“it’s hard to imagine the motives weren’t good…”
Um… well, you don’t have to ‘imagine’ that, since the motivations were clearly stated at the time and well documented. I understand the feeling of wanting to grant ‘good intentions’ to everyone generally – and certainly, how things were understood at the time was simplistic and would prevent some understanding of the real downstream impacts; but the intention was to destroy the culture and breakup the families and to inflict harm as a means to an end. In the same way Trump’s enforcement of family separations was intended (per official policy statements) to cause harm in order to make people ‘think twice’ about trying to come. (and to criticize this policy doesn’t mean one necessarily also believes that we should have open borders… again, these kinds of arguments basically create a black/white division unnecessarily.)

I think it’s weird that you want to suggest that what happened to these children and their families is ‘just’ a matter of being separated from their mothers “for a few years” at a very young age. (and that a ‘good’ mother won’t be impacted, etc) First of all separation from mother is itself traumatic regardless of cultural issues, with fairly severe psycholgoical effects, and second, there was much more than just separation involved, so maybe look into it a little before declaring what you think you know about such things.

@GSW:
Your approach seems to be that any criticism immediately gets elevated to political correctness. I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with you. I don’t appreciate the abuses that are going on with those PC narratives – and there are a lot of abuses going on right now; but I also believe there are legitimate issues that need to be addressed and lumping any attempt at discussion as ‘PC’ only validates the SJW folks – they can point to that and say, “see, this is why we can’t have a discussion, so we need to censor everything that might be a ‘problem.” Even Ben Shapiro when he discusses these kinds of issues recognizes that racism exists, that institutionalized racism exists and only debates the actual abuses within the pc narratives… your approach may feel good to you, but it adds nothing of value to any meaningful dialogue or solution. I guess this is the definition of ‘trolling’ behavior, particularly when using condescending language (“how precious.. ” etc. and maybe why I shouldn’t bother responding any further to you.. )

@ gda:
Have you ever considered that other ‘inferior’ cultures that weren’t basically invaded and then stripped from their cultural heritage were able to assimilate in a healthier way into the dominant culture and adapt while still maintaining their culture? Also, we came into their world -whether or not that was inevitable or acceptable in the context of historical norms is irrelevant to this point. We weren’t ‘invaded’ by them; we invaded them. There’s some difference in that context. Whether we should we expect people to assimilate and create the conditions that support that is a different thing from forcing them to.

Generally disappointed by so many bad faith arguments and comments here. I was expecting more from the quillette audience..

Geneticists say the indigenous Papua New Guineans are genetically related to the indigenous north and South Americans. One can look to PNGto see the result of leaving the culture in isolation, without interference.

@xyz and such. I enjoyed your commentary. I’ve noticed similar things as you. But the articles are usually a good starting point, and the debates/contrast help refine the thinking. It’s some of the most thought provoking content around. We need principled, non-partisan, contributors so stick around keep sharing facts and demanding a higher standard of discussion.

“Caracalla always is listed by historians among the worst emperors of Roman history. ”

Actually no, he isn’t.
And these ‘lists’ are pretty much mental masturbation anyway, like the 10 best presidents lists, heavily depending on what the discerning individual wants to find or focus on, Military exploits, finances, civil atmosphere etc..

Canada is still one of the most tolerant, welcoming, safest, non-racist countries in the world. I do not understand how Canadians and even the present Prime Minister can accept the charge of genocide regarding missing and murdered women as per the recent inquiry report. I was not born in Canada and immigrated legally many years ago from a Latin American country exactly for the reasons I listed above in my first sentence. Unfortunately, I have seen these conditions deteriorate in the last 20 years or so, and even more during the administration of the present Trudeau government in view of its divisiveness, “wokeness” (I think this is the right word), “politically correct”, intersectionalist policies and frame of mind.
This inquiry had to create a more than 40 pages supplement to justify its charge of genocide. To call present day Canada a genocidal country in relation to missing and murdered women is a misnomer. It cheapens the word itself and it is an insult to the vast majority of citizens in this country, including myself and the millions of citizens who were not even born in Canada but made it their country and have been proud of it.
If one is going to use the justification exposed in the supplement of the report in relation to the past, then basically every single country on Earth should be considered genocidal (China for its 1000 year subjugation of Vietnam; Arabs in view of their conquests in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond and their use of white and black slavery in greater numbers than the Europeans use of black African slaves; Mongolia for their conquests in Asia and Europe; India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Rwanda, Japan, etc.) regardless of race, ethnic background or religion.
If you look at the present, then Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live, and the number of people wishing to come to it is a testimonial of this truth, otherwise why would so many people wish to move to a genocidal country?
The fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly agreed with this assertion by declaring it to be a “truth” is shameful in itself! I am tiring of hearing him apologise again and again for historical events viewed according to present day standards and sensibilities and to hear from various groups claiming to need special advantages and compensation in view of their supposed disadvantages.
Blaming colonialism does not hold water, as Canada became what it is (or was until a few years ago, before “wokeness” conquered it) because of colonialism with its warts and all! If colonialism, racism, genocide is what Canada is about then why do people all over the world aspires to live here, and Canada year after year appears as one of the top countries of all the world?

It seems natural for us northerners to tend to be a little bitter. However, politicians saying silly things “on our behalf” is what we hate. Every day, it seems, regardless of party, someone says something banal or deceptive.

The latest installment: government agrees that the missing women crisis is a genocide. As if the obvious lack of law enforcement, community building, and integration was not at the core of this problem; which are all tricky problems to solve that require interested parties and professional time and money. “No? How about a memorial instead?” – signed, Canada. That’s what we Canadians hate.

Also, employing this term genocide by charging it with a new, synonymous meaning via 40 pages of logic jumping serves as a wedge to do away with realistic observation and instead creates a new social heuristic to make decisions based on the actual meaning and history of the term. It provides sentiment over solutions, and is a cheaper alternative to “doing work”. Use of the term genocide becomes a Hail Mary attempt at augmenting the severity of the issue so that people will hear it, without concern of the logic chasms in the way. It is polarizing by way of the sentiment that you cannot possibly deny, argue, or support genocide, and it is also convenient that Canada has a history of abusing this term by ignoring evidence and exploiting statistics. But that doesn’t matter to Canada — the definition is pushed to a convenient place and abused as a social heuristic for domestic or even international affairs to divide those who acknowledge or not. It’s becoming a charged term used conveniently in politics — and that’s offensive.

The difference: Amid genocide, a campaign sets out to destroy a group of people. Amid missing natives, a campaign struggles with funding and interest to help.

My family immigrated to Canada after a few brushes with something much more resembling genocide. Spared Hitler’s Holocaust thanks to the US, persecution in the home country got bad enough that like most other Jews, they fled. Turns out coming to Canada means they themselves became genociders!

It is embarassing and pathetic that Canada is parading around its kink for self-flagullation in public. Why are some people so desperate to see themselves as oppressors, that they would make up an imaginary genocide? Does the world not have enough horror without Canada broadcasting this falsehood about itself?

From the Facebook comments on all the news articles about this, I gather that Canadians are tired of wasting money on these insulting, childish games. It’s time the sane majority insists that anyone who sees themself as a genocider or colonizer return to their ancestral homeland. Those of us who love Canada can do a better job without them. And for the Indigenous in that camp, let’s start the decolonization process with your wifi and car.

Every time I have talked to a Canadian about Canada, they have gone on and on about how peaceful and tranquil it is there. You can’t get them to shut up about how accepting and loving and diverse their population is.

This MMIWG Analysis is really eye opening! Turns out Canadians are a bunch of genocidal maniacs. Really good to know before planning a vacation up North.

It turns out that Hitler didn’t really die in his bunker in 1945. Nope! He snuck out to Canada and began killing native women in his spare time in-between his Hitler Youth meetings.

Take a closer look next time you visit… those things floating down the river aren’t logs, they’re corpses! See the smoke coming out of the chimneys? That’s not wood they are burning in there…

I think they are also cannibals. Women sell their babies to restaurants because the younger ones are far tastier than older specimens! Where do you think those ‘disappeared’ native women go?? Think long and hard before you enter a Canadian restaurant!! Personally I prefer native women with a strong red… like a Shiraz or Zinfandel. Regional tastes vary though.

Next time you go Canada, outside of the culinary scene, be sure to sign up for the ‘clubbing baby seals’ side trip! Nothing like killing, and eating babies! Delicious with French Fries and broccoli! In Quebec they smother it in sauce and call it Poutine.

Today in my newspaper a piece of 2 Dutchmen living in Atlin, North Canada, and assisting with 30 other whites a Homecoming diner of some 100 Tlingit Indians there, everybody bringing his own food (sort of Thanksgiving??). More or less the same complaints at that table by the Tlingit as in Kay’s article, an old man comparing the residential schools of once with the Naziconcentration camps (his own idea? or that of visiting SJW’s?? ). -The tragedy of the indigenous Tlingit communities- was the title of the piece. Indeed, a tragedy, but nowhere a genocide, of course.

And presentism should be avoided here. At present, we live with the rather new philosophy of equal cultures and civilisations. But remember: this is something rather new, and western (even in China, the Uygurs are still put in such re-education camps, to become good Chinese citizens).

In that same encounter, some Tlingit criticised the sums and supports in dollars to be handed out to the “”First Nations” (read: the indigenous communities) because they would make things worse, and strengthen the dependency even further, deepening alcoholism and stress. So, I wonder, who comes up with those strange ideas and misguided generosity??

The residential schools were a mistake of course. If we’d left the little Indians to die in the squalor and ignorance of the reserves, they’d not have lived, and learned how to sue us for the fact that they are alive and educated. Today we call going to a school where you’re not allowed to speak your native tongue ‘immersion schools’ and you pay extra for it.

Although not sure the only other option was to “[leave] the little Indians to die in squalor and ignorance.. ”

So setting that up as the only alternative isn’t exactly intellectually honest. How about if we had made fair agreements with them for the land (and then honored those) so they could continue to live in a way that honored their culture and their humanity? We won’t ever know, since what happened is what happened, and its legacy is what we are left to contend with.

About this new Congo, read Reybrouck’s history of the struggle for and first years of independence, in which many Congolese he spoke to sighed: ” OK, it was a nice experiment, but when is it over? And come the Belgians back to bring some order, justice, work and productivity again? Of course, this is said only in the dark corners, not in the newspapers and the media, not there, and not in Europe

@ferretlord Nobody knows what the death toll was since you have to estimate the pre-colonial population on the basis of practically no reliable data.

That there were monstrous crimes against humanity should not be in question. However, Kay does give the impression of being more concerned with establishing his anti-genocide credentials than with historical accuracy.

The driver was greed, and there was no master plan for racial extermination, so here too the use of the g-word is contentious. As in the Americas there were many deaths from European diseases.

“Belgian rape” is tendentious: it was King Leopold’s personal fiefdom, maintained in the face of mounting criticism within the country and an international campaign (led, note, by white men). When the Belgian state reluctantly expropriated the king the abuses stopped.

Correction: Those of us of European ancestry are genocidal. Recent immigrants from Somalia or Haiti or Syria or other superior countries do not bear any stigma. They belong here. Canada is their rightful home. But European Canadians are Settlers — interlopers and genocidal colonizers who do not belong here. They don’t really belong anywhere, they have no home, no place they can call their own. My Dad immigrated in 1948, but, being sort of white he shares in the racial collective guilt anyway of course. But the sad truth is that he was too late to really have made any serious contribution to genocide. The fact is, I doubt he ever killed a single Indian. A very poor performance.

Yes. Our sin is to have paid the wages of the people in the Canadian bureaucracy that perpetrate these things.

The Indian act is as close to a communist Utopia as possible. No private property, an intrusive government agent meddling in your life.

I’m ashamed that as Canadians we didn’t rise up, march to Ottawa, burn down the Indian affairs building, hang a few ministers of the crown and put an end to this nonsense that has done terrible things to people, by law. But we didn’t.

This commission report, like so many others, wasted a great deal of time and public money And asked for an additional $50 million on top of what it already spent) to arrive at an untenable conclusion and made far too many recommendations to be implemented.

The use of “genocide” in this report effectively killed its utility. It is no wonder Canada is so reluctant to create any new commissions of inquiry. They take an average of 5 years, cost an average of $50 million or so, and then give us a penetrating glimpse into the obvious, with a heavy dose of ideology.

I know this isn’t the authors primary point, but people truly over-egg the “past civilisations were all murderous tribalists who universally believed it was morally acceptable to murder-rape people outside their city-state/nation/empire/race/religion”.

For example: Julius (not yet) Caesar’s incredibly successful assault upon the northern barbarian tribes, for which he was very nearly executed when he returned to Rome (it was a close vote of the Senate, and arguably he only survived because some thought he should be executed, some thought he should be exiled, and others thought he should be handed over to the barbarians as a form of apology – i.e. the “we don’t massacre people for no reason” vote was split.

At that time, he was already considered the greatest general that the Romans had available. He was also seen as one of the greatest intellectuals of their time, having recently published an enormously successful 3-volume work on Latin grammar and literature (kind of a hybrid between the disciplines that we would now call “literary critique” and “linguistics”).

And yet he was almost executed when he returned from his most successful war campaign, because the Romans found it so utterly despicable that he had attacked and humiliated (in return for not slaughtering them all) tribes of barbarians for no better reason then to demonstrate to them the superior oratory of the Roman legions.

I.e. the Romans clearly saw that kind of conduct as being very different to “war-time” enslaving & slaughtering. They were very nearly willing to give up one of their greatest human assets, and you would have to suspect that when Julius Caesar was assassinated, many of the “he must be killed to save the Republic” faction had in mind that earlier controversy over his lack of moral judgement.

Another example: the only reason why we know the phrase “they [the Romans] created a desert, and called it victory” is because (a) the Roman writers AT THE TIME thought it was such immoral conduct that they felt obligated to record the barbarian tribe leader’s words, and counter the careerist propaganda of the victorious Roman commanders; and (b) most Romans agreed, and it became the Roman’s own self-critical view of that episode.

Example #3: the ancient Greek city states resolved most of their territorial disputes through arbitration – not negotiation, arbitration, where a 3rd party made a decision on who was right, and they stuck to it. Amazingly, this even applied to the superpowers, Athens and Sparta. When Sparta eventually won the Peloponnesian War, the Corinthians wanted them to enslave and destroy – not only did Sparta refrain from doing this, but they threatened to invade Corinth (their most important ally in that war) if the Corinthians did it. The reason, was that Athens and Sparta had an arbitration agreement, and Athens had offered to put the dispute to arbitration. Sparta was deeply uncomfortable with their own victory, as a result.

There were pretty clear rules on “acceptable slaughter” back then (and this stretches all the way back to the Mycenaeans – the earliest Greek historians viewed it as predating their civilisation – and you can also see the Persian’s applying it in the Greece-Persian war, the Macedonians applying it under Philip and Alexander, the Romans applying it, and fre pretty much all of the barbarians except for the vandals and late-era visigoths):

You had to give the other side a chance to surrender with some degree of self-rule intact. That was the ultimatum that the Persians would present, the Athenians, the Spartans, the Romans (I don’t know about Egypt, but they would be the exception if they did not have the same policy) – i.e. “if you surrender and give us authority over military/trade/taxation, you can keep your own legal/political system intact. If you don’t, we will kill or enslave everyone”.
There had to be some reason for inflict then this upon them. That reason could simply be “they’ve got land that we want”. What bothered people about Julius Caesar’s conduct, was that there was no pre-existing dispute with those tribes – the Romans view was “either he inflicted misery for misery’s sake, or he just killed a bunch of people to advance his career”. Neither of those things reflect well upon a person, even in the ancient world.
They were always the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, the losing side would simply lose their internal autonomy is the consequence of not surrendering.

There is good reason for this – war costs money, and if you kill everyone so that you are left with a bunch of empty land, there won’t be anybody to pay your taxes and the whole thing will be a massive financial loss. An empire that makes a habit out of it won’t remain an empire for very long. Moreover, the “do this abroad, and soon you will be doing it at home” theory is one of those things that pretty much every civilisation works out for themselves.

Now there are plenty of examples of ancient empires, city-states and nations breaking arbitration agreements and still enslaving the losers, and also plenty of examples where they invade and slaughter someone without offering internal autonomy, or out of “conquest for its own sake”. But this was the exception, never the norm. Cultures that treated this as normal quickly disappeared because (a) everyone hated them, (b) they wouldn’t have any trade, (c) they’d go broke from spending all their resources on wars that resulted in no tax revenue, and (d) they would invariably be idiots because non-idiot cultures would work out reasons (a)-(c).

Genghis Khan style “successful slaughtering hordes” were as rare in the ancient and mediaeval world, as “genius psychopaths” are today. When they exist, they REALLY make an impact, but they aren’t to the norm – most “slaughtering hordes”, like most “psychopaths’ quickly become victims of their own excess.

If there’s a fundamental difference between the ancient and modern world when it comes to mass killing, it’s that standards were difficult to enforce back then. The Julius Ceasar example is an excellent illustration – by the time Rome found out what he’d done, it had already happened. Sometimes the generals WERE punished, it’s almost always better to have neighbours that don’t hate you – even if you’re Rome/Persia/any other ancient world superpower. But often, the damage is already done, and they would just be giving up a competent general for no benefit – in fact, for SOME reason they’d often find themselves in unusually urgent need of competent generals following an unprovoked mass slaughter:-)

This got worse in the Middle Ages, because communications got worse. It improved again when communications got better. When we entered the age of modern communication, where central command could actually follow what distant generals are doing, we entered the modern era.

Nothing to do with changes in morals. Everything to do with changes in the opportunity for careerist military commanders to take actions that were good for their personal power, but detrimental to their nation.

” Nothing to do with changes in morals” ? I think it has, in line with Steven Pinker’s philosophy on enlightenment and progress. What to do with the conquered neigbouring populations? Annihilating them is not such a good idea, better enslave them and let them do the work you yourself think too good for, work the grain fields, build the roads, the walls and the cities. Djengis Khan was chief of nomadic tribes, therefore, better annihilate then, and make space for more grass and horses and warriers. The Spanish started by enslaving the Indians in their encomiendas, however, this did not work out well, and bishop Bartolome de las Casas had the enlightening idea to change them for blacks from Africa.

Neither of these things are done these days. I think, because of a change in morals, Pinker was right. Though, maybe the Canadian Tlingit (see above, earlier comment) and others don’t see it so rosy, OK, but once conquered and dependent on new masters, your fate seldom improves, whatever the morals of the day.

And for hunter/gatherers (= 90 % of the time schedule of us humans), annihilating is even more imprtant than for nomadic tribes of course, just think about it, all those karibus, bisons, seals and mammoths, no longer for the others, but just only for you now! heaven on earth!

“This has produced mixed results. Germany has set the gold standard with its unqualified rejection of Nazi ideology,….”

You lost me here. They have imported tens of thousands who have a Nazi-esque ideology called Islam. It’s a real problem despite the left’s embrace of that form of patriarchy. German officials are even telling the Jews not to wear any identifying accoutrements like a kippah or star of David jewelry in public.

Because the figure 70% only represents actual convictions, the real figure is likely to be nearer to 90%.

Abuse on reserves is perpetrated disproportionately by those in power (chiefs, their relatives and hangers-on). As we saw when the MMIWG inquiry was travelling from place to place and women were giving their testimonies hoping that it would help in their quest for justice to be served, they were stonewalled by band leaders and others who were above all interested in seeing how this commission could be used to blame the the murder of Indigenous women on ‘racism’ and fill their coffers from another lawsuit.

Coincidentally, an article on early Canadian inhabitants and their migrations appeared last week in Nature. What I read there about the different groups: ” Each of these populations (paleo-siberians and -esquimos a.o.) largely replaced earlier inhabitants”. Pardon, what? Replaced? Replaced?

A nice example of creeping concepts and meanings, not yet genocide modern sense, but something quite similar, I suppose.

Why not include it in the history canon on native Americans and Siberians, not replacing the current propaganda, but just as new study material, certainly as important to know by all of us, the Canadian First Nations included!

Marxists: which term I think is a far more accurate descriptor for all socialist ideas, have been debasing the meanings of words for more than 135 years.

The do it with positive sounding ideas like progressive and they do it with evil ideas like genocide.

Had I been Prime Minister, I would have reject the report in the first instance if I saw the word ‘genocide’ without words in front of it making it clear that was was happening in Canada was NOT a genocide.

Thank you Johnathon for a nice deconstruction of the drivel that seems pass muster amongst the humanist ascendancy that now controls most of our system of social administration right across the increasingly degenerate and effete affluent western world.

We in Australia are suffering exactly the same Chronic Ideological Disability Syndrome (CIDS) emanating from this fetid bunch of regime apparatchiks.

What is interesting is the regime politics of this dismal state of affairs, which is to obfuscate present dysfunctional governance and shift blame for the libertarian chaos ‘Humanati’ policies have caused in still semi-tribal indigenous ‘communities’, since they took control away from the wicked colonial paternalists in the early seventies.

This dysfunctionality has three prongs.

The first is the way that the ascendancy has entrenched its ‘poor thing’ clients in a state of protracted dependency that ensures they stay exactly as they are on permanent welfare. This keeps their ‘benign’ white (and only just off white/overwhelmingly European petty bourgeois raised ‘aboriginals’) masters and mistresses in the fat stipends, academic makework and state funding swill to which they have become very accustomed.

Secondly, the ascendancy panders to its clients’ most traditionalist and atavistic feelings, insulates them from the consequences of their negligible commitment to modern education, the endemic poor behaviour and anti social values within those communities, and expertly shifts the blame to anyone or anything except their clients and themselves.

And thirdly, the ascendancy has systematically used the poor-thing-my-country anti-colonial narrative to reinforce its own credibility, legitimacy and power in its jostling with its corporate regime partners in a politic of collaborative conflict that parallels that of the medieval Church and Crown institutional duopoly.

Both of the regime partners service the economically and socially/economically indulgent, deregulated and privatized world order of Indulgence Capitalism that has systematically entrenched publicrelationsmarketspeak and postmodernist fantasizing, fake identity peddling, pushing the primacy of feeling over analysis, perception over substance, subjectivity over objectivity, desire and satiating it over discipline and restraint, and adolescent narcissism over adulthood….all to further blind consumption of anything that has been sold to populations with no defences left but to obey the messages from the sponsors, no matter what it does to them, their social infrastructure, or a crumbling natural world that cannot possibly service the fanciful exponential demands being made on it.

These sanctimonious humaniti regime pricks are not in the least benign because they have no interest at heart except using others as pawns for their agendas, promoting their delusional pretensions and reinforcing of their own standing and capacity to attract state funding for causes that never get any better because they are not designed to.

They have all the endearing qualities and techniques of jewel wasps to seduce their victims into becoming food for their offspring…by using their inventively totalitarian manufacture of prejudicial language as a colonizing soporific to paralyse normal defence mechanisms against palpable baloney that wouldn’t have past scratch in a year 10 school English clear thinking exercise, fifty to sixty years ago!

It is not enough merely to demonstrate that their use of a word like ‘genocide’ is pure panther piss. Their ideological language is peppered with the same shit. We have to go after the bastards with the same dedicated enthusiasm that one would go after an unreconstructed, customer shorting, collateralized debt securities spruiking bankster, or a transgen school based gender studies pedogroomer, or coal execs who wilfully go on mining the stuff knowing that the resultant warming will kill a large slab of their grandchildren’s generation, along with much of the rest of what is left of the living planet.

Nice work Johnathon, but leave the gloves off next time. OK? It is completely unnecessary to pretend to be an empathetic humanitarian with all the officially righteous bases covered. Brutal honesty is in the end empowering. Nice sounding lies and excuse making isn’t. Indulging people eventually destroys them….and the culture they inhabit…and fixing it is going to be messy and unpleasant.

You forgot to mention the intersectional inclusion of all “2SLGBTQQIA people” in the official MMIWG report itself. The report explicitly adopts an intersectional feminist lense to critique overlapping structures of power and oppression. The propagandistic nonsense being pushed by this committee is sickening.

It’s worth considering: how is a society oppressive in which the purported oppressors not only fund, but champion the findings of committees that are designed to petition the oppressors to address injustices against the oppressed?